


a language of raindrops and stars

by rgdivine



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: M/M, Nonlinear Narrative, experimental fiction i guess, gratuitous pretentiousness, second person future tense, seriously its gonna be weird
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-25
Updated: 2020-09-25
Packaged: 2021-03-08 04:48:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,405
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26639818
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rgdivine/pseuds/rgdivine
Summary: your name will be keiji, and you will speak a language of raindrops and stars.or, akaashi is fluent in obliviousness and self-doubting, and in being different and alone, but that's okay, because bokuto is fluent in akaashi.akaashi week 2020 day 4: stars
Relationships: Akaashi Keiji/Bokuto Koutarou
Comments: 2
Kudos: 12





	a language of raindrops and stars

your name will be keiji.

your story will begin in a small town where the stars never fail to shine and where it rains every weekend and clouds huddle close in the sky. your world will be small, at first, but it will grow, and you will grow alongside it, until you are a force of nature.

you will fall in love for the first time when you are four years old and the skies will open up above you, and it will rain so hard that you will ask your grandmother as she will rub your dripping hair with a towel if the stars themselves will fall from the sky. the sheer power of it will astound you.

your grandmother will tell you that the stars are much higher than the clouds, and that even though at times they may cover the sky, the stars are too great to be pulled from its fabric by even something as magnificent as a storm.

the next night, when the clouds will have moved on, she will take you outside and show you the stars.

it will not rain on the day that he graduates. you will think this is bittersweet, sitting high above and watching him fiddle with the tube that will be his diploma. it will be a perfectly clear day, and that night the stars will be entirely unobscured. all the better: there is a meteor shower, the radio will say that morning, and something will shift in you.

he will not be there with you, but you will sit outside in his honor and stare up at the stars as they rain down, too weary even at that age to do something as innocent and hopeful as wishing upon their flight, and something heavy will settle in your chest, not for the first time and certainly not for the last. you will put your hands out, as if in your cupped palms, you could collect them as drops of rain.

from the first day you go to school you will know that you are not like the other kids. the volume of their noise puts you off—you would not describe it as _fear_ but as a certain intangible dislike, and you will avoid them. they, too, will avoid you in turn, because your face will be too cold and your eyes will be too flat and you will be too much of an enigma for them, too. a mutual misunderstanding will unfold between you, and them. a rift of missing words and not anything more serious than the instinctual hesitance of the unknown.

you will not mind. they will all prefer the sun to the rain. (more for you.)

at times it will be like you are speaking a different language than they are, a language of raindrops and stars which fall to the earth, speckled with light and moving far too fast for mere observers on the ground to catch the details of. you will learn, therefore, to be quiet.

quiet, that is, most of the time. there will be an exception.

he will be different.

you will fall in love for the second time when you will go out to the fields with your grandmother and she will bring, this time, a telescope. you will be old enough to handle it, she will tell you, unafraid that youthful carelessness would cause damage to precious equipment. your hands still will tremble as you peer through, and the distant field of stars will feel suddenly much closer, and suddenly much more real.

“look,” she will say to you, and you will pull back from the scope and follow her gnarled finger and gaze towards the sky. again she will name the constellations that you have memorized; she will never remember that you remember but you will never mind learning again.

she will let you go back to looking through, then, and you trace the same shapes in the sky, drink in the sight of nebulas and distant stars around which orbit distant planets. the universe is vast, and you will learn it early.

you will forget the tremble when you will raise your hand to the sky, eye still pressed to the scope, and try to touch the distant lights. there are so many, they will take your breath away, shining brilliant and full of power and above all else, far away and unreachable.

you will go home wrapped in a sweater that is warm and the color of cloudy skies and you will be too breathless to sleep for a long time. when you finally manage you will fall asleep to the thought of holding the stars in your hands.

the day you move to the city will be rainy, two weeks after the funeral. she will leave the telescope for you and you will hide it, somewhere in the back of your stuff in the half-empty moving van that trails behind your car. you will prop your head on your hand and watch raindrops race down the car window, crowning the victors with invisible accolades, and starting all over again from the top.

“it’ll be okay,” your mother will say after a while of silence. it will feel unsettlingly like she is trying to comfort you; you won't understand why. you will never doubt that. the clouds will cover the sky just the same in tokyo as they will back home, and the stars will not change position just because you will move.

(loss is a funny thing.)

tokyo, though, will disappoint you. you will learn of such things as _light pollution,_ and you will remember the way she said nothing as magnificent as the greatest storm could pull the stars from the sky. something approaching fury will flood your veins at the betrayal. the storms could not bring the stars to earth, but something as low and pitiful and plain as human greed could make them vanish altogether.

(try as you might, you will not be able to explain why this makes you sob. loss is a funny thing.)

  
he will ask you: "why do you like the rain so much?" and you will not have a good answer.

you will feel frequently like you don't have a good answer for the questions that he will ask you. he will have a way of doing that to people. he will be magnificent and stunning but in the way of stars, too bright to stare directly into at close quarters, but too far away to touch for real, and you will know that very well. it will confuse him, hurt him, because he will not mean it, and you will know that, too.

you will answer him: "it brings life to the earth and it covers the sky. it says there are bigger things out there. the sky is so vast, and i like the way that makes me feel."

your answer will be unsatisfactory to him; you will know. you will see it in how his face will drop, just a little, and how his eyes will slide to ponder the wall, and he will leave silence in your wake as you hurry to class. he will so rarely do that, leave silence, and that will be the greatest indicator of all, because you will know him so well, keiji. he will be anything but straightforward, he will be incalculable and uncategorizable but you will never back down from a challenge and you will never get tired of the thrill that you feel when you overcome one. you will learn him well, because you will never get tired of the thrill that you feel when you are the reason that he is strong.

(you will like several feelings, but you will top the list with the ones that will make you feel like flying, when your chest is heavy and light all at once with the awe of the otherworldly, great phenomena that rule the skies. storms and stars.)

you will know your answer is unsatisfactory, but he will still be an enigma you have yet to fully puzzle out, because you will not know what he is looking for.

it will haunt you through your classes.

he will graduate and the stars will fall, and you will fail to catch even a single one.

and life will go on.

you will learn the language of captains (not so much different of a language you will speak as vice-captain, but back then the language of the team will be different too, back then it will be a dynamic formed around a star as the planets orbit their own. after you will be left alone on this team, on this court, adrift, you will learn to forge a new language, one of the vacuum and the depths and the sea; it will be nothing like your language of stars).

still, you will learn to love it, a little bit. maybe you will let yourself love it a little more, because it is close to the earth and you can reach out and touch it, you will touch it, you will clap your teammates on the back and you will go to nationals and you will lose, and you will graduate and go to college and every day you will look up at the sky and see, intermittently, stars and clouds.

and you will be reminded of loneliness, and emptiness, and distance and absence.

sometimes you will think, curled up on the window bench and pressed against the glass, that you are not like some of those you’ve heard of, you’ve met. people who fall in love with a passion so young and never abandon it. hinata from karasuno and his love of the skies, a setter from miyagi you will read about once because you will never feel like your sets are the best (no matter what he will say). you will not think you are like them. volleyball will be fun for you but you will not play in college and you will not regret the decision (very much).

(but the memories will swim to you as groggy things do, and you will remember the grandeur of the skies pouring down on you for the first time, and the vastness of the stars, and you will think that if you had to choose a lifelong passion it would be that: being the smallest thing in the greatest sky.)

you will be fully grown, a college student, and the revelation will come to you in class, with grief so strong that you will drop your pen. you will think that from the start, every life is planned. the fate of every drop of water is to eventually become a puddle, where it will reflect the light of the stars high above before a tire will run it through and scatter it. it will have been so easy to pretend to be a protagonist, and you will be so choked by the thought that perhaps you were never so, that you will refuse to answer his messages for a day.

(then you will feel guilty, because even without seeing his face you know how he looks, and even if he will have been telling you with pride how he has become just a normal ace, there will always be some habits unshakeable. keiji, would that you open your eyes. you will, though, you will.)

the third time you fall in love, you will hesitate. there are those who would label this trivial, especially when compared to the pure and grandiose love for something as huge as downpours and the constellations. what on earth could ever compare?

but then you are falling in love anyways, and who could ever say that such a thing as the smile of bokuto koutarou was something trivial?

it will be no secret that you enjoy literature, and art, and writing. it will be no secret that you are transfixed by stories, by weaving a narrative and presenting it to the world (even if you would rather not be the face upon it, but the vital support for it).

if you were a writer, the thought will cross your mind unbidden, you would make bokuto the protagonist. you would stand him under a streetlight at night, as the rain pours down, drenching his hair to his skull, but the stars remain unobscured by clouds. miraculous, beautiful. you will think that he could pull it off.

(you will never write such a story, that is not what you are meant for. but his story will be told anyway, and you will find it in yourself to be happy.)

falling in love with bokuto himself, a step beyond just the blooming, bright, perfect smile he will bear, will be a longer task, if only because there will be so much more to work through. there will be moments of longing so intense you will have to sit down, and moments of such quiet realization that it will be no more stunning than the feeling of another puzzle piece slotting exactly into place, just as expected.

it will not leave your mind. why do you like the rain? why do you like the rain? the way he will ask as though it was not a crime, but a fascinating endearment, a part of the puzzle he could not quite fit but adored nonetheless.

you will think he longs for an answer that would dazzle him, an answer worthy of admiration, an answer that will belong among the stars as he will.

because bokuto will like magic. he will like grand things, great things. he will walk among the stars and he will live for it. your answer will be unsatisfactory because, you will think, it is so simple. the simple things in life will never satisfy someone like that. bokuto will live for the grand skies and the world's eye.

but you will think yourself plain.

(oh, keiji. he will know you so well.)

realizing you are in love will be easier than admitting it aloud. you will realize sometime in college that you are not entirely as closed and unreadable as you will think you are, because people-reading kuroo will take one look at you on a trip to visit kenma (with whom you will have grown much closer) and he will sigh in the utmost exasperation at what he will call your pining. (he will be right, but you will hide a scowl with a politely bland expression, the true meaning of which he always reads just fine, and he will scoff and laugh and leave you alone, sort of, because he is nice enough, but his words splash over every thought you have all day and fill your mind like a seafaring vessel with a leak.) he will tell you, in parting that weekend, to stop being oblivious and just confess, already.

you will tell kuroo where he can shove his advice, but you will say nothing, nothing, to bokuto. there are some things he will never need to know, you think.

but breathlessness will chase you like an old beau, it will show up at your door and sit down beside you on the couch as you watch him play as he always has. there will be something incredible about being _just an ace,_ as if he could ever be _just_ anything, as you are _just_ breathless and your lungs _just_ fill with stardust and stifle your breath.

every time he will play a game with his new team, he will send you the date and the time and the venue, excited and loud and wordy as always, and it will never fail to make you smile. you will not go to every game. you will wish that you could, but you will not be the protagonist of the world forever and you will not live a perfect life.

you will go to a game and it will be cloudy outside, overcast in the way that promises a storm, with the faint shapes of billowing thunderheads, jostling one another for space in a too-small sky. your heart will pick up, just a little, because this sort of day will also never fail to feel like an oath you have just barely forgotten, or one that has yet to come.

the game will not yet be started when you take your seat in the stands, several rows back—a good enough view, but not close enough to see the eyes of the players. that’s a good thing, you decide, because you will not be able to see if he looks at you, and better, you will not be able to see if he does not.

old friends will take their seats beside you: konoha on your left (he will understand your suffering well by now, for he will have always been the most observant of your old friends, and he will never be too kind to enjoy a good laugh at your expense), and sarukui on your right (who may enjoy a laugh from time to time, but never in your company, a front, at least, that you will be grateful for). you will fall easily into old patterns of habits, as if you never left (were left).

the opposing team will serve, and then their offense will begin, and the honor of the first set, the first spike, will go to bokuto. (you will choose not to mind that it is not your set that he will hit; it will not have been your set for some time by now, and you will still choose every time not to mind. a star needs sets to match, you will think, and while you will know that you were not unskilled, you never shined in this way as he did. you will choose not to mind.)

he will jump up to spike, as he always does, and your eyes will trace his shape as they always do, seeing in perfect clarity how a tremulous high school form will have grown so quickly, so easily, into a perfect professional grace.

almost without your bidding, your hand will raise and close, as if to clasp around a distant star, and pull it close.

of course, he will be too far away.

the thing that will bother you the most in the least serious way about bokuto will be the way he never goes into the rain with an umbrella. not necessarily on purpose, and certainly not for lack of (your) trying. he will just forget, and you will always remember, and you will trail after him (as you will always do, too busy following him to see that he will always follow you), and brandish the umbrella you will remind him to take in the morning when the forecast will say rain.

you will be a young man, barely twenty, when this will happen for the uncountable time. you will follow him into the academic courtyard of your university—he will have come to visit you and for another uncountable instance you will have ignored the implications of this, too deep in your self-imposed distance to pay attention—and you will brandish at him his own umbrella from beneath the shelter of your own.

“bokuto,” you will call over the sound, over the _awe_ —another thing you will never leave behind (the heart-pounding greatness of a true downpour and the way it muffles the world will never cease to strike a chord deep within you). “you’ll catch a cold! please take your umbrella.” you add: “you won’t be able to practice if you are sick.”

he will turn and the world will stop, a kind and fleeting gesture from something that has never ceased to watch.

his hair will be plastered to his scalp, your bag slung across his front. his eyes will be wide and filled with the same delight as the grin he will wear and dressed in black and gold he will catch whatever rays of afternoon sun pierce their way through the dense skies and illuminate the rich greens of the plaza and, oh, keiji, he will _shine,_ magnificent and everything you will wish that you could have.

he will speak and you will have to force yourself to hear (because speaking means the world has begun to move again and it is moments like this which you will crave to live in forever, bittersweet).

you will dream of a small house in a distant village, somewhere out in the country where the sun is shrouded by clouds and the stars shine bright and full in the sky, ancient and familiar. it’s a house you will never see in person, but you get to build it in your head and it will feel like home.

when you will be young, the house will be full of many empty rooms, all without a roof so that you can watch the sky. you will call it the house of a million rooms, and you will waste hours cataloguing them all in your mind and adding more on to each wall.

a little older and you will cut down the rooms and add a guest to this house: first a girl, faceless, someone you will think you are supposed to love, as you will understand the order of the world to be what it is. you will even add a backyard with a wide and beautiful garden, because it will seem like something she will want. then you will open your eyes a little, peek into the world, and the faceless girl will become a boy of many faces, as you flip through them like a magazine, wondering what you like, what your life will be, and you will move into the garden and learn to love that yourself.

(in your last year of high school, as the heart grows fonder in absence, you will settle on a particular face.)

the starscape that floats high above will never change; sometimes in your lowest moments you will dream of the stars falling into your backyard and you will put them all into jars and keep them on shelves. his eyes will scrunch as he looks at them all, and then at you, and laughs, not unkindly, and says to you: “i love this.”

(the laugh will be such a guilty pleasure. the words he does not say will be too much to indulge in. _i love—_ you will make the star in your mind say, and then you will stop.)

you will settle into your skin slowly, like it is a hardship to fit your being, made of water vapor and stardust, into this imperfect, mismatched, puzzle piece mold you've been given. if you would be given a chance to fly from it, watch the world with a bird’s eye view, you won't doubt that you would take it.

but your cold hand will fit perfectly in his, his fingers wrapped around the back of your palm, calloused and rough but perfect and you will feel the stardust beneath his skin, too. you will think maybe he took the time to settle, too: you will remember him packing himself in small spaces as though that would help keep his body, bursting at the seams from the brilliance of the supernova soul it held, from collapsing.

you will be trapped in his orbit and he in yours, kept in perfect balance. it will work, somehow.

he will like those small spaces; you will learn this fast because you will have to. if there will ever be a question of _where is bokuto now,_ you will know, because when he is upset and when the world is too big, he will seek out the small places and he will hide.

you will find him, on a morning where the sun pierces the sky and fills the world with the light of the microscope, studious and unyielding, hiding underneath a shelf and half-obscured by a bin of volleyballs. the closet is dark, but you will have no trouble making out his every detail, line and curve, in the sliver of light that hardly reaches him, let in by the door you will have left only cracked behind you. after all, by then, you will have had his features memorized for some time.

sitting next to him will make your palms dirty, the seat of your shorts dirty, because the floor will inevitably and inescapably be dusty, but there will be (as there often is) a broken and despairing look in his eyes that you will always be weak for. (not for the first time, you will wonder if there is something more deeply wrong, something of which he will never speak.) sitting next to him will make your palms dirty, but you will do it anyways.

there will be a moment of silence. these moments always crawl in your lungs and stay there. even his voice will be the stuff of the stars; it will not be meant for silence like this.

he will say: “hi, akaashi.”

his voice will be subdued. you will swallow, try not to dust your palms (for fear of sending a cloud into the air) and respond in the same tone: “hello, bokuto.”

the silence will linger, and you will get uneasy, nervous. restless. _not these quiet moments,_ you will think. his eyes will be closed now, and you will speak gently.

“you were hard to find this time, you know.”

“sorry.”

“it’s alright. do you want to talk?”

stars will flare and burn and live their cycles of brightness and dimness and bokuto will remind you of a star in many more ways than just one. sometimes all he will need is a little encouragement, a little spark, and that you will be happy to provide. but sometimes, he will be just a little bit harder to read, a little further out of reach, and you will do your best to cover his sky, give him the space he needs to recuperate, and he will come to you eventually.

he will not be ready to come just yet.

“it’s stupid,” he will mutter, and glare at the ground. funny, you will think with no humor. he usually will not think his own moods are stupid. his mind may not make sense to many others, but it will always seem to make sense to him.

you will know better than to argue with him. “why do you say that?”

the way his chin will jut out will not surprise you but it might disappoint you, just a bit, and you will dust your palms anyway and the brief cloud of dust will give you cover.

“bokuto,” you will say. his shoulders will tense for a moment, and then relax.

he will say: “really, it isn’t anything actually, but—but someone said that i’m—i’m exhausting and a lot to handle and they feel bad for you—and—”

ah, you will think. that’s what this is about.

he will fall quiet when he catches sight of the look on your face, and he will turn his body to face you just a little bit more as his head will turn the opposite way, worrying his lip and worrying his heart. the words you will turn over in your head, wondering a little how is the best way to say what you want to say.

as you think, the dust will tickle your hand; you will conjure the image, the fleeting desire, to touch your hand to his, and not for the first nor the last time will you content yourself with even the thought, so overwhelmed by the starlit warmth of even the _idea_ to need the real thing.

you will run your fingers over your opposite knuckles instead, chasing the dust.

“we speak a different language than they do,” you will confide in him, at last deciding on the words, the words, the only words you can think to say, and you will be (at last) unafraid to say them, because you will never feel as though he won’t understand (a minor miracle in itself, for you will spend so much time in all your life not being understood). “we are the stuff of the sky, and they aren’t.”

you will not mean it unkindly. he will not have an unkind bone in his body (for which you will be grateful and ever admiring). he will understand.

“yeah,” he will say, and his eyes will gain a little bit more light. you won’t need to say the next part, but you will _want_ to, because you will have decided you have danced around it for a bit too long.

“even if all the others think it’s stupid, bokuto, i won’t. i will always be there for you.”

(you will be speaking utter, utter truth.)

you will pass formally into adulthood on a cold day, and it will less than rain as much as it will snow, and in special reward you will put all your homework away the night before, for just a few hours and sit outside and let your hair get plastered to your head. catching a cold will be worth it, you will think.

at midnight the sleet will stop and the stars will peek out at last. your phone will ring in the other room. he will text you happy birthday right on the dot, a full minute before the rest of your team, former and current, will do the same. he will ask you if you’re busy. you won’t answer, and he will assume you are asleep, and wish you a (fond) goodnight. the clouds will drift in front of the stars again.

keiji, you will be a great many things, a force of nature first among those, quiet, yes, too, at times, and you will be content with these moments stolen and filed away, moments alone with the vastness of the world. but brave, you will not be. you will see his message and you will decide that he will never need to know that you were wide awake when he texted, nor what thought, what face crossed your mind as the stars shone valiantly through.

the feeling of floating and falling and being held by warm star’s light will last the whole day, though.

on the day that you will graduate the sky will fill so hastily with clouds that you will almost be amused at the suddenness. the rain, though, will patiently wait its turn until the evening, when you will be just realizing that the end of an era has swept upon you just a year too late.

the world will figure itself out, your college letters will already be awaiting, and you will throw yourself down on your bed and realize that you have begun to speak a second language.

no one on the team your last year of high school will speak the language of raindrops and stars, and the cobbled-together dialect you will all manage to lose nationals with will sink into your skin as ink as deep and as dark as the sea. it will be a dialect heavy and rich with words of loneliness and emptiness, because you will be the captain and the setter and your baton will conduct their orchestra and your moon will sway their tides.

(you will feel just the slightest bit guilty. next year they will build a language of soaring flight and great horizons.)

bokuto will miss your graduation. he will be doing training in osaka that he cannot miss and he will fill your messages with apologies. you will not hold it against him until that night, when the tides of the ocean that has filled your body for the last year will shift dramatically and drain into your lungs and emerge as bitterness in your airways. when you will seize your phone from the bed and prepare to lay into him, carrying all the fury of a storm over the sea.

then you will see it for what it is—misguided grief, and fear, and you will drop your phone back to the sheets and yourself right after it and you will breathe out, limp.

(you will end up texting him this: “i miss you. let’s hang out before i go to school.” as if he could ever deny you when you will speak words so sweet.)

the night before you leave you will dream of life unfiltered, life perfected.

there will be those who would call you impenetrable, heartless, because you will be quiet and watchful and occasionally, when you will have to be, sharp, and they will mistake these things for coldness, the way they have done since you first entered the world, with flat eyes and a language of stars and clouds, but you will always be at your brightest, your happiest, your most expressive, when he will be at his best.

you will crave the sound of the ball slamming the floor after his legendary spike. you will be addicted to the look in his eye as he turns—always first to you—with a wide grin and you will meet him with open arms (you will grip his forearms and he will grip yours and nothing more, not then) and yelling triumph. others may think this uncharacteristic for you but with your team at your back you will never waver. this will be the way of fukurodani, and more importantly, it will be the way of the two of you.

in your dream it will happen like this: bokuto will spike and the buzzer will sound and you will win, as you do. you will turn to him, already shouting victory and already heart pumping but only half of it isn't the butterflies of loving awe. it will take two strides to cross the court to him and he will meet you with open arms.

your feet will leave the floor.

your mouth will fall to his like rainfall and it will be the best thing you will ever have known.

behind you someone will say: “get a room!” konoha, you will think, teasing. the rest of the team will laugh but they will still cheer for you because this will be their victory too, and you will all be…

happy.

you will wake feeling like your lungs are filled with light and your veins flooding with stars, shoving at the skin as they fight their way out, and sweat will drip from your body like rain and you will _yearn,_ oh keiji will you wish.

for two years you will feel better than a dream; you will feel real, you will speak the language of stars and fill your eyes with their light and the ebb and flow of the skies above and the torrent of rain will fill you with awe as an empty bowl left outside.

but this time, it will not last. (you will be meant for happiness, but it will take time, and you will learn patience and humility and grace.)

you will lose. the final game, you will lose, and you will sit down when it is over and there is a brief moment between when the third-years are finished changing and you all will have to leave, where you will be left on your own. you will bury your face in your knees, folded at your waist, and you won’t cry. your breathing won’t even hitch.

after all, you will have expected this. you are a watcher of rainstorms, a lover of transient things, of storm clouds which rain themselves out and shooting stars which pass in an instant. you will play volleyball the next year, of course. but it will not be the same, and you will know.

when you are thirteen and still with young eyes the color of the sky on your favorite days, you will meet him for the first time. even then he will astonish you. the brief fleeting thought will pass your mind that he is a star. his gaze will pass over yours without stopping, but your breathing will catch all the same and you will suddenly understand what it is to yearn.

you will decide right then where you will go to high school. if nothing else, at least that decision will be easy.

you will confess to him in the spring, under a downpour. you will not expect him to hear, but he will, and you will catch just a moment of the glowing delight in his eyes, the satisfaction of a long wait finally seeing fruition, before his lips will meet yours and your hands will find his and you will be halfway through college, laughing at yourself over all the heartache you could have been saved. oh the want for a little bit of courage.

(he will confide in you, an admission in trust in return for the one you gave him so long ago, doused in dust, that he feels often like his lungs fill with water, that he _drowns_ in you. he will confess that you to him are safe, that you give him the cover that he needs when just being a star is a thing too bright, too visible. he confides that you are the stuff of the sky, of the seas, of the air around him. he confesses that he loves _you,_ keiji, and you will be scared even to hear the words, that they will pass through your ears like light intangible.

but his eyes will be glowing and he will be looking up at the sky veiled in clouds and listening to the distant rolling thunder and he will keep going without an answer, which is good, because you will have none to give.

he will say: we speak a language of raindrops and stars. he will say: before you i had never thought of that as such a good thing. everyone around me spoke a language that i didn’t, and it meant that i was alone and misunderstood. he will say: but i don’t mind speaking the same language as you.

he will still not be looking at you. you will look at the sky and the wetness that drops down your cheek you will convince yourself is rain.)

he will ask you again: “why do you love the rain so much, keiji?”

it will be a quiet night, and a distant shooting star will cross your path and you will be too weary to do anything as jaded as not to wish upon it, and you will wish for an answer that he will find satisfactory, caught up in the way his voice will be soft as silk, hardly louder than the cicadas. it will be a perfectly clear night, and the house behind you will not have anything close to a million rooms, but it will have one for you and him to share, and at some point you will decide that is enough.

because you will be a fool. or, you will think yourself a fool. fools, that is, fall in love with transient things, distant things that cannot be grasped: stormy days and shooting stars, and bokuto koutarou. and you will think that even one room’s worth of one stolen presence, your own personal star in a jar that is much greater and much more comfortable than those of your daydreams, is more than enough when it comes to something so fleeting.

(what makes you a fool, keiji, one of the clouds and playmate of the stars, boy of the sky, is that you will grow so used to cupping your hands around nothing that when the star for whom you long lands itself delicately in your palm, you will wait eternally for it to fly back to space.)

you will say to him this:

you will be four years old when you discover what it is to live, truly, in the moment. when you will be drenched to the bone, breathing in the scent of rain, a feeling of life that sinks in as the water does. when the world will knock on your door and introduces itself as yours for the taking.

you will say to him that you love the feeling you get when you see him in perfect form. he will laugh and ask if you are comparing him to the unstoppable force of a storm and you will frown, shake your head, and press your finger to his lips.

“stop interrupting.”

you will say:

you will be ten years old when the stars will steal the breath from your lungs. you will never lose that childhood awe—every star you meet you will treasure, but the glittering things in the sky will be distant and cold and every day they hide away and not every night do they return.

but that will be alright, because there will be one that never will: bokuto koutarou will be a star unlike any other; a star who will refuse to hide himself away (or at least, not for long), a star whose flame burns warm and kind.

bokuto will love magic and he will love with all his heart, and you will, at times, many times, make yourself distant from the star you so adore. there is no way, you will think, that something as everyday as yourself could hold, within that sort of heart, a special place.

still, you will be wrong. you will be wrong more times in your life than you know what to do with, moments that spill out of your hands like rainwater, and go splashing over the pavement. you will think you know the world, that you understand it, and every time he will prove you wrong.

because bokuto will love the open skies and the towering mountains and the sheer, unquantifiable vastness of space. he will love the great things, and he leaves stardust in his wake when he walks. but he will tell you how he loves owls, and the dirt (that cakes your hands from the garden, you will always love it), and the ordinary plain things of the world.

you will say this, really:

“i love you because you are untouchable by even that greatness. i love the way that the rain reminds me that i am alive here, in the same time as you, in the same place. that it reminds me that you are a part of my world and yet, high above. i love the way that it plays with the stars, and the way they shine so much brighter when the clouds recede.”

somehow your words will never come out exactly how you mean them, but you will think he gets the picture, from the way a grin dances on his face and he leans in to bump his forehead against yours, against your lips he will say that he likes the rain for the way it makes the earth damp and the plants green, because even if all the stars went out, if the rain stayed then the world would flourish.

somehow his words will always, always…

life will go on.

you will lean your cheek on your hand in the middle of the kitchen as he paces and gestures and you will watch him talk and you will think that bokuto is meant for the open skies and the great expanse of the stars, that he is meant for another world and that in lieu of that, that this world should give to him all that it can offer. but you will think, too, that it is kind of nice that he likes the plain things too.

you will sleep with his hand in yours. you will wake to the touch of his lips as he goes for his morning run, and you will wake again when he brings you coffee and a sheepish smile, always, always bashful about rousing you, always shy in the face of your sleepy eyes. you will get every invitation to every game he will ever play, and you will be there when he wins just the same as when he loses. you will never stop thinking that he is meant for great things.

but at some point, you will forget to mind that he chose you, instead.

**Author's Note:**

> hello & thank you for reading this mix of stream of consciousness and projection and other nonsense. this is also my debut into writing for haikyuu, so thank you very much! i hope it met your expectations. this is also a style of writing i've been tossing around in my head for a few years now, so i hope it worked somehow!
> 
> find me on twitter @rgdivine ! i'm brand new to haikyuu and i'm looking forward to making more content & meeting more people!


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